> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://verdeallday.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The ones that got away: Reimagining the West table without (some of) Austin FC's late dropped points - URL: https://verdeallday.com/the-ones-that-got-away-reimagining-the-west-table-late-dropped-points/ - Published: 2026-09-22T23:00:25.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-22T23:00:24.000Z - Description: In the real world, Austin FC is tantalizingly close to entering the West's playoff places. But on Earth 2, if five matches against contenders didn't include late goals against, the team would be in much better shape. - Author: Phil West - Tags: 2026 season, austin fc, analysis, table math It's remarkable, given some of the hard luck Austin FC's had in 2026, that it's still in the playoff race. Heading into Saturday night's match hosting San Diego FC, Verde are just one win from assuming 9th place in the Western Conference table, provided this scenario involving other teams plays out: - Seattle and RSL draw in Wednesday night's lone match; - Seattle either loses to or draws Minnesota; and - RSL loses to or draws New England. There's even the possibility, should all the above happen, should Verde win their match against SDFC decisively, *and* LA Galaxy lose decisively to Colorado, that Verde could vault to 8th — should enough Verde and Rapids scoring happen to make Verde's goal differential (a now-woeful -12) better the Galaxy's almost-as-dismal total (now at -8). That's good news. What's even better is that the trend that harpooned Verde's playoff hopes from the opening match — goals given up from winning or drawing positions from the 68th minute on — appears to be on the wane. While the 2026 edition of Verde have given up 17 points when the defense has faltered late (in 10 different matches), they haven't done so since Aug. 16\. They even more recently dodged adding to that total, with the 2-1 win at Portland on Aug. 29\. Oleksandr Svatok's stoppage-time goal clawed back the two points Verde appeared to have ceded with Antony's 89th-minute penalty kick, and Verde showed more mastery over Cascadia teams. But now, with Austin FC on the cusp of playing the first of four remaining High-Value Games against playoff bubble teams, we have to wonder about the Austin FC team that plays on Earth 2\. Let's say that version of Austin FC held firm in at least five games against bubble teams (or, in one case, a bubble-adjacent team), to be seven more points to the good, ascending above the current logjam around the playoff line. Let's go back in time and pretend what happened didn't happen. ## Feb. 21, Austin FC 2, Minnesota United FC 2 ### (90th-minute Kelvin Yeboah goal, two points dropped) The season opener, in which Austin held a 2-1 lead late, turned on a now-LA Galaxy player refusing to drop to the ground when injured. Perhaps we should have seen Verde would have its share of bad luck over the season based that sequence. Here was then-head coach Nico Estévez breaking down what goalkeeper Brad Stuver declared to be "two points dropped." > Details in games are important. To tell you a little bit, the whole story is we were going to make two subs go to five in the back, because Minnesota brought two forwards to bring more height for set pieces, and ... in the late minutes, because Minnesota is a very dangerous team on the set pieces. And what happened is Robert Taylor felt a twist in his knee. And as for the subs, we had to hold this up in order to change the card and bring out Taylor instead of the other player that we were planning. > I think that confused a little bit everyone on the field, and they took advantage. I didn't see the goal yet. I saw the end part. I think we have to work on those situations and do better. Maybe, maybe, when we asked the player if he's injured because he was injured ... we just go down, tell the referee, and the referee probably will ask the the athletic trainers to come in check. And I think we have to be better in those situations ... But I think we can take a good learning from that and have strategies to do better next time. We'll come back around to Minnesota — who, for the time being, is just one point behind Verde in the standings, falling behind due to going 1W 8L 6D in their last 15 matches, doing pretty much the opposite of what Verde are doing late in the season. ## March 14, Real Salt Lake 2, Austin FC 1 ### (89th-minute Stijn Spierings goal, one point dropped) To be fair to Austin, this goal came out of nowhere in a match that seemed destined to end in an 1-1 draw. Sure, Besard Šabović served as a sort of an escort to Stijn Spierings on the goal, running alongside him on the play rather than demonstratively defending, but Spierings hit his shot early and unexpectedly from a distance that seemed unlikely for him or anyone else to score from. (MLS rated it a 0.03 xG chance.) The loss led Estévez to say, "Today, we didn't deserve to leave Salt Lake City without a point." Judging from the underlying numbers, though, Verde would have been good to escape with the point. From our morning-after article: > The 82/18 field tilt, the momentum chart reflecting that Verde was most threatening at just two minutes before half time and two minutes just after the hour mark, a 24-10 shot advantage for the hosts ... it all reflects a match that went largely RSL's way, despite Verde getting the early lead and Brad Stuver containing most of the RSL opportunities. Indeed, the first goal RSL "scored" was an unfortunate Svatok own-goal equalizer, coming after unlikely goalscorer Jon Bell getting the visitors up on the scoreboard first. ## May 10, Minnesota United FC 2, Austin FC 2 ### (69th-minute Anthony Markanich goal and 77th-minute Joaquin Pereyra goal, but also, 79th-minute Christian Ramírez goal; two points dropped) This one was wild. Hanging on to a 1-0 lead, Verde fell victim to Colombian star and MLS short-term stowaway James, in his most convincing appearance during his three-month stint with the Loons, yet found a goal from one of the Loons' original MLS heroes. Your basic MLS After Dark special. This match also produced one of my favorite Estévez post-match assessments: "I think sometimes we did well and sometimes we didn't, and we have to learn from that for the next time we play." *Sometimes We Did Well and Sometimes We Didn't: The 2026 Austin FC Story*, coming to a bookstore near you! And, if you're keeping tabs, that's four points dropped from late goals given up to Minnesota this season. I do wonder if this would be different would one of the matches against the Loons happened in the Davy Arnaud era. Alas, this one came a week before the inflection-point loss to SKC, which we're not counting in this tally since SKC is a sub-bubble team, but that match was another two points lost with late goals (in the 79th and 82nd), and if you claw those points back, Verde's on 39 points instead of the 37 we're arriving at in this thought exercise. (Ultimately, you'll see it doesn't make a difference in the Earth 2 standings, but it's something to keep in mind.) ## Aug. 1, Colorado Rapids 1, Austin FC 0 ### (90th-plus-4th-minute Rafa Navarro PK goal, one point dropped) Arguably, the nadir of the Arnaud Era came in what should have finished as an 0-0 draw, but turned via Przemysław Płacheta capping off a team performance marked by extreme offensive anemia, committing an avoidable foul of Rafa Navarro in stoppage time. Navarro then delivered one of his final gifts to the Rapids — ahead of his surprising move to St. Louis toward the end of the summer transfer window — with a PK conversion allowing a probably-but-not-really-deserving host to win at home. The typically positive Arnaud declared in the post-match press conference, "Tonight was not progress for us," and in the same availability, Brendan Hines-Ike gave us one of our clearer player's-eye view (up to that point) on the team struggling to adapt to Arnaud's new system. > I played this system before, and it's very difficult to get it down right away. But when it gets down and when it's there, it is very effective, and it's come a long way from what we started with when we started this eight weeks ago in the preseason, and just kind of completely changing how we play, so there are positives from that end ... \[Arnaud\] said from the get-go, it's not going to be perfect. It's going to take time. There are going to be a lot of issues that we have and that we're going to work through, and we're going to see who's about it and who's not about it. For me, it's about getting behind him as much as possible, and giving him everything that we have, and I think that's all that this group can do right now. Certainly, the team's gained more mastery of the system, evident in the still-ongoing seven-match unbeaten streak. Verde's come some distance from this second leave-it-late loss at Mountain Time altitude this season — but those losses remain on the record. ## Aug. 16, Austin FC 1, FC Dallas 2 ### (73rd-minute Petar Musa goal, one point dropped) This match is bubble-adjacent rather than against a true bubble team, but worth noting because it was a winnable match at home to a team that would have dropped into the bubble had Austin won. At the time it was played, FCD was above the bubble with a 1.57 PPG; in the seven matches since this win, FCD has gone 4W 1L 2D to ramp up to 1.69 PPG to be nearly 0.2 PPG above the bubble. Barring an unforeseen collapse, Dallas will make the playoffs. The ultimate lesson from this match is one that Austin players and coaches likely already knew: Don't leave Petar Musa with time and space at the top of the box to pick out his spot and shoot. Arnaud had an explanation for his team's lacking performance, particularly in the first half. > We lacked energy. We lacked speed of play, and I don't know if it's necessarily from an energy standpoint, because \[in\] the first 45 minutes, that shouldn't be an issue. I think it was more from an emotional standpoint. I think it was an emotional week with the Leagues Cup, and we just weren't there. We weren't ourselves in the first half, and I thought you saw a much better version of us in the second half. The match not only delivered all three points for Dallas in Austin, it also allowed its 0-0 return leg draw in Frisco on Saturday to be just enough to secure Copa Tejas. (Had this Aug. 16 match finished a draw, the upcoming Houston-Dallas match would have decided this year's Copa Tejas; drawing in Frisco doomed Austin regardless because of goal differential stemming from Austin's 3-0 loss to Houston. But I had to do some math on it to make sure.) ## Let's give Austin those seven points Pretend those late goals against Western Conference contenders never happened. With 37 points and an improved record of 9W 7L 10D (from 7W 10L 9D), six goals taken out of the goals against column, and (to be fair to the premise of wiping away all that happened in those late stages) one goal taken from the goals for column, Verde would sit in 7th in the West with a goal differential of -7\. And because those changes would also impact the teams Austin played in those five matches, here's what the table below Austin would look like — starting with Colorado dropping from 7th to 8th. - 7) Austin FC, 37 points, 9W 7L 10D, -7 GD - 8) Colorado, 34 points, 10W 12L 4D, 0 GD (down from 36 points) - 9) LA Galaxy, 33 points, 8W 10L 9D, -8 GD - 10) Portland, 32 points, 9W 12L 5D, -1 GD - 11) San Diego, 31 points, 8W 11L 7D, 0 GD - 12) Seattle, 29 points, 7W 9L 8D, -5 GD - 13) RSL, 27 points, 7W 12L 6D, -6 GD (down from 29 points) - 14) Minnesota, 25 points, 5W 11L 10D, -9 GD (down from 29 points) - 15) SKC, 18 points, 5W 17L 3D, -34 GD (!!) What's most fascinating to me about Earth 2's table is not that Austin's three points above the playoff race fray — though that's certainly good — but how less tight that race becomes. Currently, on our Earth, only four points separate 8th place from 14th place, and even flagging Minnesota has a conceivable shot at ending above the playoff line. In this scenario, though, Austin keeping its rivals from taking points off it means that four points separate 9th from 12th, and there's a definite striation developing in which RSL and Minnesota might drop out of the race before Decision Day (joining SKC, which is not yet wearing an "e" next to its name, but is close). (SKC winning out would bring it to 45 points. There's still hope!) ## Lessons to be learned With eight matches remaining, it behooves Austin FC to win when it can and draw when it can't win, starting with Saturday against SDFC. It's a possibly even more depleted lineup then we previously feared, with Ervin Torres slated to go to Spain for USYNT U-20 camp, though U.S. Soccer [doesn't make it clear](https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2026/09/ynt-u20-mnt/us-under-20-mens-national-team-training-camp-spain?ref=verdeallday.com) if players are traveling Sunday or must be in Spain by Sunday. (We're working on getting clarification from the club.) We know that Joseph Rosales and Myrto Uzuni will be out on international duty for that SDFC match, and Guilherme Biro's also out for being a bad, bad boy. (Consulting the rulebook let us know that missing the Dallas match in Frisco was for the red card, and missing this one will be for yellow card accumulation.) We also know that SDFC will be missing a trio of players, including goalkeeper CJ dos Santos, who plays for 2026 World Cup darlings Cabo Verde. The thought exercise we've just gone through shows the importance of games against bubble teams no matter when they occur. Sometimes, what happens around those matches involving your team render them less consequential — look at that Minnesota record in the last 15 matches, making those four lost points less painful. Sometimes, your team gets the better of those bubble games — such as Austin did in Portland and in Seattle. But if we arrive at Decision Day and Austin just misses the playoffs, keep these five matches we just reviewed in mind. It won't take away the sting of being sidelined, but it will serve as a reminder that, in MLS, what delivers a team to the postseason (or holds them back) can be isolated decisive moments. Like, for instance, a defender clattering into a forward just weeks away from being moved to a team with a better record. Or a defense momentarily giving an MLS Golden Boot contender a narrow time and space window in which to score. Or a player who won't finish the season with your team trying to play right after being injured rather than going down as is the late-match, time-wasting norm. It can be just that maddeningly simple, accompanied by the hope that "this won't come back to bite us later." Those are moments in which you might have said that very thing. And, if so, they might prove to be moments of ominous foreshadowing. After all, in the West, nine teams make the playoffs — but six teams don't. And sometimes, though it hasn't happened to Austin FC yet, the Decision Day reaper comes for at least one team. *Verde All Day is a reader-supported online publication covering Austin FC. Additional support is provided by Austin Telco Federal Credit Union. For more coverage, check out* [Emergency Podcast!](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/emergency-podcast-an-austin-fc-podcast/id1742052077?ref=verdeallday.com) (an Austin FC Podcast) *wherever you get your podcasts.* *Also, we're fully in the 21st century now; join us on* [*Instagram*](https://www.instagram.com/verdealldayhq/?ref=verdeallday.com) *to get updates on all our stories and podcast releases.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1e/d1/1ed16f3e-4f96-4b65-9a04-4b0634738b99/content/images/2026/07/Verde-All-Day-Newsletter-Banner-Ad-2.png)